In the mid-2010s, media artists began developing practices using machine learning (ML) as an artistic medium. Since 2022, the rise of large generative models, the mainstreaming of AI as consumer products, and intensifying ethical disputes have reconfigured the conditions of their artistic practice. This paper aims to understand how artists working with ML over the past decade respond to these shifts, shedding light on how practices, tools, and culture co-evolve. We address this question through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 artists active before 2020. Our findings show how artists experience narrowing aesthetics and reduced malleability of post-2020 ML systems, have diverging views on where to locate moral responsibility with large AI models, and face shifting cultural reception that challenges the legibility of their work. We map how artists envision their practice going forward and discuss those orientations with respect to HCI conversations on design and creativity.

In accessibility research, the choice to adopt or abandon assistive technologies (AT) is often treated as a stable proxy for functional fit: to adopt is to confirm a good fit between device features and individual needs, and to abandon is to signal poor fit. While useful for design, we argue that the framework is ill-equipped to account for the sociopolitical forces that shape AT use in historically underserved communities. In this paper, we propose a power-aware framework that recasts adoption not as a transparent expression of fit, but as situated negotiation of power. Drawing from an eight-month ethnographic study at a local nonprofit, we examine how low-income, racially-diverse, and disabled families navigate institutional cultures that reinforce normative expectations around disability and AT use. Building on postcolonial theories of power, we introduce the concept of minor resistance to describe the subtle, everyday tactics through which individuals lower the cost of access on their own terms. We argue that this shift in analytical lens reframes the goal of accessibility design from optimizing use to lowering the cost of choice. We conclude with implications for how designers can support community-driven responses to structural barriers by centering self-determination.

A growing body of research investigates how to make captioning experiences more accessible and enjoyable to disabled people. However, prior work has focused largely on English captioning, neglecting the majority of people who are multilingual (i.e., understand or express themselves in more than one language). To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews and diary logs with 13 participants who used multilingual captions for accessibility. Our findings highlight the linguistic and cultural dimensions of captioning, detailing how language features (scripts and orthography) and the inclusion/negation of cultural context shape the accessibility of captions. Despite lack of quality and availability, participants emphasized the importance of multilingual captioning to learn a new language, build community, and preserve cultural heritage. Moving toward a future where all ways of communicating are celebrated, we present ways to orient captioning research to a language justice agenda that decenters English and engages with varied levels of fluency.

This paper examines prevailing understandings of creativity in creative computing research through the lens of feminist epistemology. We analyze “creativity support” as a construct that encodes different definitions of creative work. Drawing on existing literature and practices, the paper surfaces four views about creative work that underpin current creative technologies and HCI research: problem-solving, cognitive emergence, embodied action, and tool-mediated expert activity. Each view makes different claims about the role of computing in creative work and the creative subject assumed. We articulate the attendant politics of each view and illustrate how critical feminist epistemology can serve as an analytical tool to reason about the trade-offs of various creativity definitions. The paper concludes with recommendations for integrating feminist values into creativity-oriented HCI research.

Menstrual pain or dysmenorrhea refers to abdominal cramping or pain before and during menstruation, causing a spectrum of discomfort among people who menstruate. Menstrual pain is often regarded as ‘female trouble’, as a nuisance that gets dismissed or as a symptom requiring medical intervention. While there are FemTech products that explicitly attend to menstrual pain, they predominantly seek to hide it without accounting for the lived experience of this pain. In this paper we use feminist disability studies (FDS) as a critical analytical lens to reframe the understanding of menstrual pain. Using this lens, we conduct an interaction critique of FemTech market exemplars for alleviating menstrual pain. We then offer three design provocations to better design menstrual pain technology and call for designers to attend to menstrual pain as a cyclical, chronic lived experience with the potential of spurring leaky contagious coalitions.

Data visualizations have become the primary mechanism for engaging with quantitative information. However, many of these visualizations are inaccessible to blind and low vision people. This paper investigates the challenge of designing accessible data visualizations through the lens of crip technoscience. We present four speculative design case studies that conceptually explore four qualities of access built on crip wisdom: access as an ongoing process, a frictional practice, an aesthetic experience, and transformation. Each speculative study embodies inquiry and futuring, making visible common assumptions about access and exploring how an alternative crip-informed framework can shape designs that foreground the creativity of disabled people. We end by presenting tactics for designing digital access that de-centers the innovation discourse.

Kinaesthetic creativity refers to the body's ability to generate alternate futures in activities such as role-playing in participatory design workshops. This has relevance not only to the design of methods for inspiring creativity but also to the design of systems that promote engaging experiences via bodily interaction. This paper probes this creative process by studying how dancers interact with technology to generate ideas. We developed a series of parameterized interactive visuals and asked dance practitioners to use them in generating movement materials. From our study, we define a taxonomy that comprises different relationships and movement responses dancers form with the visuals. Against this taxonomy, we describe six types of interaction patterns and demonstrate how dance creativity is driven by the ability to shift between these patterns. We then propose a set of interaction design qualities to support kinaesthetic creativity.

The stereotype of creativity as an isolated, individual activity has given way to a more nuanced understanding of creativity as a social process. Our interview study of 23 contemporary music composers and choreographers focuses on the role that artifacts play in shaping creative collaborations with performers. We found that creators and performers form relationships where the creator acts as an author, a curator, a planner, or a researcher, and the performer acts as an interpreter, a creator, an improvisor, or an informant. Furthermore, we found that creators sculpt, layer, remix artifacts, moving fluidly across these different forms of interaction throughout the creative process. We conclude that the slippages that occur at the seams between roles and interactions drive creativity forward by opening up pathways into the future.